GrottoPod

Tamara Barak Aparton got more than than she expected when she left the San Francisco Examiner for a post with San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s office. The former reporter found that, far from being the dry,

Everybody, it seems, aspires to be a travel writer. This week’s guest, Kimberley Lovato, author of Unique Eats and Eateries of San Francisco and two more books, is already there. Join us as Lovato shows us how the travel-writer sausage is made,

Many authors come to writing later in life, but few make the kind of splash Julie Lythcott-Haims did. She was a Dean at Stanford (and, before that, an attorney) when she quit to pursue an MFA in her 40s. Flash forward,

Ben Marks, the general manager of Collectors Weekly, brings his colorful backstory to the GrottoPod on this week's episode. Join us as we trace his wanderings from a childhood in San Rafael to a career that has included working on a lobster boat in Mai...

Some people want to meet their heroes; writer/historian Dennis McNally made a career out of meeting his. Already the author of the definitive Beat biography, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America,

Writer Mary Ladd was carving out a niche for herself as a San Francisco food and nightlife scribe when she ran headlong into a diagnosis of breast cancer. Looking ahead to a long road of treatment, illness, fear and a concerned husband and small child, she chose to tackle the crisis with humor. This week, on the eve of her “nipple launch” party, Ladd joins BQ and Larry to discuss how cancer changed her writing and her approach to freelancing, and how facing the worst sometimes brings out the best. She's currently shopping her book The Wig Report, illustrated by Don Asmussen, based on her blog of the same name. Keep an eye out for it.

 

Maw Shein Win is the place where punk and poetry meet. Win is a prolific poet -- and the poet laureate for the Bay Area city of El Cerrito. She's also the former percussionist, along with Mark Dutcher, for Los Angeles post-punk band Pearls Before Swine. She joins us on the GrottoPod this week for a wide-ranging conversation that touches on the many shades of her colorful life, including her long career as an educator, her ongoing collaborations with artists and musicians, her new collection of poems and her experiments with New Wave hairdos during the 1980s. Check out her most recent chapbook, Score and Bone, on Nomadic Press, and her upcoming full-length collection, Invisible Gifts: Poems, on Manic D Press in April. Her launch will be at City Lights Books April 10.

What’s your New Year's resolution? Does it have something to do with writing? Do you want to write and publish more (or less)? Ease into the new year -- and your literary resolutions -- with Larry and BQ, who toss around some thoughts about how to appr...

For next “best of” GrottoPod episode we return to our roots -- and the San Francisco Writers Grotto’s roots -- with guests Po Bronson and Ethan Watters. The Grotto co-founders joined us for GrottoPod Episode 2 to discuss the Grotto’s humble beginnings ...

This week, we travel back in time to visit with GrottoPod producer Lee Kravetz as he anticipates the release of his second book, Strange Contagion, last June -- and then return to the present as Lee recaps the mania of his past six months.